Starter House A Novel (36 page)

The front door slammed. “Eric’s back,” Lacey said. As she left the bathroom, the fresher air in the hallway struck her like a shock of cold. She coughed and clutched the door. It wavered like cloth under her hand, and the whole house twisted, sucked upward into the smoke’s plume, pressed down like a baby’s head under a mother’s hand. The door slammed again, and Lacey hurried toward the stairs. “Eric?” she said.

The entrance was empty, the welcome rug kicked to the side and crumpled. The door turned on nothing and crashed shut. Lacey walked down, not letting herself hurry.

She stood in the entrance, where the floor was a pool of gold. She looked up to the porthole window, a black circle, starless night quartered by the white frame. She had expected a moon. The front door opened to darkness. No light shone from Harry’s windows across the grass, no windows gleamed from across the street, yellow from floor lamps or blue from televisions. The house’s light stopped at the threshold. Lacey reached out, with a hand so cold that it felt like someone else’s, and closed the door. Drew stepped out from behind it as it swung across the dark.

He glowered at her. He was so angry, and yet so small; at that moment she could not fear him in spite of everything. “You came back,” he said.

“I told you I would.”

“You said you loved me, but it was all a lie.”

Lacey knew angry children. They would do the worst thing they could, but mostly she could cozen them out of their rage. And then there was Allan Montego. Two weeks into her first year, he refused, utterly and passionately refused, to take a note to his parents about his homework. She insisted and demanded, she asked him
why, why?
, and he swung his book bag against the Smartboard and cracked the screen. Although she argued on his behalf at the hearing, he was expelled, because it wasn’t his first violent act, but it was her fault. She had pushed him farther than he could go.

And now she had pushed Drew. Allan Montego broke the Smartboard. Drew could kill her. She said, “Are you Andrew Halliday?”

Drew opened his mouth. Starless night cracked open the creases of his lips, darted up the smile lines into his eyes, blackened and spread in the blue veins of his forehead. The blackness split and swallowed him, reached up and over Lacey like a raised fist, a tall wave on the point of breaking, the vertigo of nightmare balanced on the point of swallowing her forever. It shattered on her, sank into her body, pulled itself upward and out of her, and was gone. She spun in its wake, turned to follow the direction it had taken.

It was the thing that had fallen past her, the bloody screaming thing, now racing up the stairs, where Ella Dane was waiting with Jack McMure, ready to banish it from the house with—what? Burning herbs, mostly sage? What were they thinking?

She ran up the first five steps, and every muscle tightened, squeezing inward on the baby. She fell forward on her knees, grabbing for the banister to keep from falling downstairs on her belly. The pain tightened until she thought her spine would crack. Then, when she could bear no more, it sank down, water into sand. The baby kicked against this outrageous assault.

Thirty weeks. Too soon, too young, too small. “Please don’t,” Lacey said to not-Merritt inside her, not-Merritt not ready to be born. “We haven’t bought a crib.”

He wouldn’t need a crib. He’d sleep in a bright womb of Plexiglas and white plastic. Too soon. Lacey waited for another contraction. The baby rolled. She slipped a hand under her dress to touch the wet spot on her underpants. Blood? No, it was colorless. Amniotic fluid? She sniffed her fingers and laughed. Imagine, that there could be time in her life when wetting herself was good news! She went upstairs on her knees, pausing on each step for balance before moving her right hand to the next banister post.

It took five minutes to get up the stairs. She knew, because she had marked the time of the first contraction on her watch, ready to time the second one when it came. She reached the top of the stairs at 7:21. Tightness rippled across her belly, but it wasn’t really a contraction, so she didn’t count it.

Just in case she had to tell a doctor, later, she noted the time. Six minutes.

Voices from the bathroom. A man’s voice, loud and deep, and a lighter voice in a hurried response. Was Jack making peace with Drew? Could that actually work?

If the child Andrew had survived, then the spirit Drew might be Andrew Senior, a man who had worn a crew cut to teach American history in 1972. What was Jack McMure doing in 1972? Lacey would bet he wasn’t wearing a crew cut, or if so, then not by choice. Maybe he and Andrew Senior could talk about it man to man, instead of the way she had tried to talk with Drew, teacher to child. She had to get to them. But the stairs were so steep, and if she stood, she would fall.

Lacey crawled to the first bedroom door and used the doorknob to pull herself up. It felt good to be on her feet, but there was something wobbly about her hips, the joint unlocked. She kept one hand on the wall as she went toward the bathroom.

It was a long walk from bedroom to bathroom, each step a deliberate act. Too quiet—she’d only lain down for a minute. Why hadn’t the baby woken her up? The light on the stairs was the golden blond of late afternoon. She’d slept through lunch, slept through the afternoon feeding, slept until it was almost time to start cooking supper, how had she slept so long?

Lacey stopped, pressing her hand against the wall, feeling the texture of the paint against her palm. She looked at her watch, which said 7:23, so she’d only been in the hallway for two minutes, yet she could not shake off this heart-squeezing sense that it was too long, too much time had passed, she was too late. And the porthole window framed a starless night, clouded and moonless darkness, not the flood of late spring sunshine she had seen. Imagined. Not seen. Imagined. Remembered.

“Mom?” she said. So many children had stood outside this bathroom door calling for their mothers. “Ella Dane? What’s going on in there?”

The door opened. Smoke twisted out, and Jack McMure roared out of the smoke, shouting in another man’s voice, “You did this, you, you, you did this!”

Lacey’s hand slid down the wall and she knelt with her hands over her face. “I’m sorry,” she wept. “I didn’t mean to, I just lay down for a minute, I was so tired!”

“After all I do, six hours a day with those freaks and hooligans, and I come home to this.” He carried something in his left arm, pressed against his shoulder and his heart, something small as a cat. A clear stain spread from it, turning his white shirt to glass. She could not stop looking. Soon the stain would sink into him. His skin would fade away, his muscles turn pink, then white, then clear, his ribs would turn to glass and his lungs to water, until only the wild red heart was left, hammering unbearable pain. He grabbed her shoulder and dragged her to the top of the stairs. “Call them,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Call them!”

“Junior,” she said. “James. Matthew. Can you come here?”

Three boys came out of the smoke. The youngest had a smiler’s dimples, even with his face pulled downward in concern and fear. The oldest came slowly, with his hands jammed into his pockets, looking at his feet. The middle child came most fearfully, tucking himself into his older brother’s shadow. His black-framed glasses slid down his nose, and he pushed them up and coughed, and then ducked his head, as if the cough were a guilty secret he wished he could deny.

“Your sister is dead.” The wet, clarifying stain was a baby’s body wrapped in a white towel. Blue lips pulled back from purple gums, blue irises gleaming under the half-shut eyelids. “How did this happen?”

The boys shuffled their feet, all but the oldest, who flashed a glance to the kneeling mother and shook his head.

“She did it.” There was a gun in the man’s hand and a sense that time had passed. The light in the porthole window had deepened to red. “She put the baby in the bath and then she—lay—down—for—a—nap. She’s guilty. Say it.”

“Guilty,” all three boys muttered, one after the other by age, youngest to oldest.

“But is she guilty alone? Because there’s such a thing in the law as a conspiracy. She killed the baby by her laziness, but she didn’t do it alone, boys.” The baby’s hair was dry, now, and one small hand was fisted against her left cheek. “No, you were here, too. And didn’t I tell you to help your mother, didn’t I tell you all?”

“Yes,” they said, oldest and youngest, but the middle boy’s answer was an exploding sob.

“Look what you did. All of you did it. All of you.”

He held the baby up in front of them. The towel fell off her bare body. In death, she had drawn herself inward, legs and arms folded into the chest, as if she still slept in her mother’s body. The wedge-shaped feet were crossed at the ankles. He held her up to show her to them, then he dropped her, threw her down the stairs. “No,” the mother said. She heard the three shots, one after the other, but she felt the fourth shot as a surge of white in her mind and body. She fell after the falling children. It was like flying.

Something caught her by her left elbow and shoulder. She cried out, struggled and kicked against it, but it pulled her back, and a panting voice in her ear called a name she did not know, “Lacey, Lacey, Lacey, listen to me!”

The pain pressed harder, a crushing and grinding intensity, and Lacey looked at her watch. Seven forty-eight, and if the first one started at 7:16, that meant, what? For the moment, she couldn’t remember how to subtract, she couldn’t remember anything. The pressure eased, and she said, “Thirty-two minutes.”

“Lacey, is it you?”

Lacey was leaning against her mother’s body on the top step. “Is what me?”

“Are
you
you? Because you and Jack said awful things— Jack! We’ve got to call an ambulance. If I let you go, are you going to throw yourself down the stairs?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Stay here and don’t move.” Ella Dane pulled Lacey backward down the hallway to the bedroom door. “I’m getting my cell phone.”

“Where’s Jack? What happened?” Lacey hadn’t felt this disoriented since coming out of anesthesia when her wisdom teeth were pulled. As then, she felt a sense of weird loss, something hollowed out that had been solid, some pain already present though not yet perceptible. She touched her belly, and the baby pushed her hand.

Ella Dane ran into her bedroom and came out with cell phone in hand. “Let me call 911 first. We need an ambulance! 571 Forrester Lane. My friend fell down the stairs.” She covered the phone with her hand and said to Lacey, “He started yelling at you. Saying things that didn’t make sense. You were both falling. I grabbed you.”

“Did I push him?” Lacey asked. “Did he push me?”

“Nobody pushed anybody,” Ella Dane said. She repeated it into the phone, as the dispatcher asked another question. “Nobody pushed anybody! It was an accident.”

“I’m having contractions,” Lacey said. “I might be in labor.” She lay against the wall and looked at the ceiling, the corner of the hallway above the bathroom. The shadows crawled over each other; the air whispered
guilty, guilty, guilty
.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. No mother would walk away from a baby in a bathtub to lie down for a nap. And the other vision, Dora kneeling by the bathtub to drown Dorothy. They couldn’t both be true. Maybe they weren’t either of them true.

“I haven’t touched him,” Ella Dane shouted. “I’m up here with my daughter; she’s pregnant. Can’t you send the ambulance and quit asking me these questions?”

“He’s dead,” Lacey said. “He killed them all and he killed himself. Because he was guilty too.” Something occurred to her. “You’d better get rid of the herbs before the cops come.” She pushed her mother away and stood up. “I’m going next door. The hospital’s not safe. Drew’s found me there before.” She saw the picture, the small fair boy next to the great piano, tucked in with a dozen other pictures on Harry’s windowsill. “I need to find out what Harry knows.” And this time she wasn’t going to be polite and let him change the subject or slide her out of his house. This time she was going to keep asking until he answered.

Chapter Forty-four

UNLESS HE WAS GOING TO VISIT
the old man, Lex avoided Austell Road. It sucked him toward home, where he could not go, no, never. It was worst in April, when the dogwoods bloomed white and pink, each one a tall fair woman in a wide-skirted dress, and memory rubbed like a stone in his shoe.

Tonight, he found himself on Austell Road driving west. He knew the names of every side street (Green Acre, Valley Church, Eston’s Farm), because his dad taught him to read maps, and made him draw maps of the neighborhood, with all the streets and names. There was no church on Valley Church Road and no farm on Eston’s Farm Way. “Names remember,” his dad told him, “even when people forget.”

Lex forgot names. That didn’t make him crazy. He could remember if he tried. On Austell Road, the streets said their names in his father’s voice, remembering, as he followed Jeanne’s gray Corolla, license plate PTY 796. PTY for pretty, he said when he bought the car for her, so she would remember. Where was she going, seven at night, fifty-eight miles an hour when the sign said forty-five?